Amil Mohanan

I have been working on a project in Geography and Environment at Loughborough University over the last year building a set of digital resources for fundraising and development in African Universities. I got to work on everything from archival research, podcast production and app development in React Native. I’m really excited to see how people make use of it.

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty published his report on his visit to the UK a few days ago. He was trying to find out why 14 million people living in the fifth largest economy in the world were living in poverty. He has remarked on the state of denial about the scale of the problem within the country. It shows how effectively the language of ‘workers v shirkers’ deployed by Cameron has worked.

Brain Massumi’s preface to the Chinese translation of A Thousand Plateaus is work of art in itself. I reckon it would probably have saved me a few years trying to figure out some of the details in the book. I tried to read one of Massumi’s older articles called ‘Becoming Deleuzian’ but I was put off by his style of writing at the time. This article on the other hand is really clear.

I remember being drawn to a photograph of an advertising display in Times Square, New York displaying the words ‘Protect me from what I want’ by the conceptual artist Jenny Hozler a few years ago. I laughed at the irony of buying it from the gift shop of the V&A, where I had seen it as part of their Postmodernism exhibition. Han’s book opens with the same quote from Holzer, and investigates another case of philosophy playing catch-up with art.